Imagine walking down a street (while wearing your mask), reaching out to someone from the crowd whom you didn’t know before, and pitching them your idea.

Scary thought, right? You are not alone, most of us will never do such a thing. And you must be thinking, those who do this will get a lot of rejections as well. But, did you know companies like Uber used cold emails to get new customers? Cold emails can even get you funding, grow your network, and get you great press coverage. 

Doing cold email is both an art and a science. Most people do not do cold emails well and that is where an opportunity lies for those who do. In this blog, I am going to tell you about the different opportunities in a business that can use cold emails to get better results. Here they are –

• Partnerships or Co-Marketing

When two companies work together to market each other to their customers, it’s called co-marketing. When Felix, a Redbull athlete jumped from space in 2012, he captured the never-seen-before footage on a GoPro. There was a marked increase in sales and web searches for both the companies post this event.

Another example in B2B domain is when Pipedrive a sales CRM company wants its users to stay in their ecosystem it informs them about Outplay, a company that specializes in sales outreach in their monthly spotlight blog. Not only is it a win for Pipedrive with their exisitng customers staying with them because they are getting so much value, Outplay also gets in front of sales prospects that are likely to convert more.

Smaller companies have an enormous advantage when they co-market with a bigger company.

So how do you go about unlocking a co-marketing opportunity for your business? Start looking at businesses that also have a similar audience to yours, reach out to relevant people in the target companies with a cold email that intrigues them, & which offer something of value to them. 

• Reach out for Link Building

As the name suggests, link building is one of the most difficult and rewarding marketing activities. Experts believe backlinks are the strongest signal to Google that a web page is trustworthy to rank higher. And when relevancy is taken into account, a well-placed link on a 3rd party website can also lead to continuous referral traffic. 

Because of the incredible windfalls, a lot of people send emails for backlink requests but often end up doing bad outreach or reaching out to wrong prospects. Here is a great example of an email that got results for Brian from Backlinkio.

Successful backlink campaigns have a few things in common – 

• Reaching out to correct people
• Having a genuine value proposition that interests/intrigues your prospect
• A personalized email that comes after researching your prospect

Pro tip: If you reach out to your prospects on other channels like Linkedin and Twitter, engage and build a relationship with them, they are more likely to reply to your requests for backlinks. You can use a multi-channel outreach tool to do this quickly. 

• Distributing your content

So you have taken 10,000 hours to create that content but how are you going to distribute it? The humble old cold email comes to your rescue here as well. You can cold email editors at newspapers, prominent writers, web publications and blogs.

Here is an example of how Buzzsumo reached out to bloggers for their post on viral headlines – 

Pro tip – Notice how they have written down pointers, making the copy crisp and interesting, almost like the juiciest sneak peek into the article. Try the same principles when you write a cold email to distribute your content.

• Making Sales

Somethings do not change like the sun will always rise from the east and if you reach out to the correct prospect with a great pitch through cold email, you will get a sale! But all this is easier said than done. Cold emails have forever been associated with sales since the time emails were invented. To get a sale now, you really have to stand apart from the crowd.

Here is an example of a great cold email – 

Why is it great? It’s crisp and personalized, plus it is sent to the right person at the right time. Messaging and targeting both play an important role here.  

Pro tip – Make sure you track your goals like email opens, link clicked, meeting booked, use personalization, and smart followups in a well designed cold email sales sequence by using a tool like outplayhq.com.